Second Contact by Harry Turtledove Page B

that, the whole great land mass was theirs to do with as they would.
    When his orbit swung north of the equator once more, he got a call from a Soviet radar station. The Russians also confirmed that he was where they expected him to be. His conversation with them, unlike the one with the American radioman, was coldly formal. He would have got rid of them, too, could he only have done it safely, and he knew they felt the same way about him. He scowled again. If only the Lizards hadn’t come along when they did, the Reich would have put paid to Bolshevism once for all.
    He couldn’t do anything about that, either. The world, when you got down to it, could be a pretty unsatisfactory place.
    An orbit and a half before he was supposed to land, he radioed a German relay ship and confirmed that he was coming back to Earth. He spoke in clear—code made listeners nervous, and the Lizards certainly were monitoring his transmissions, the Americans and Russians probably were, and the British and Japanese might be.
    A touch of a button fired the retarding rockets in the nose of his spacecraft. As soon as they had burned long enough to slow the craft and take him out of orbit, he shut them down. The touch of another button slid covers over the openings to their motors. He breathed easier when sensors confirmed all three covers were in place. A motor opening left unsealed would have wrecked his aerodynamics, his spacecraft, and him.
    As he slid back into the atmosphere, the nose of the craft and the leading edges of the wings glowed red. The ablative coating on them was a Lizard invention that all three human nations that put men into space had stolen. Little by little, the stick came alive in Drucker’s hands. Before long, he was flying the upper stage like a large, heavy glider.
    Germany’s Baltic coastline was anything but interesting, especially after so many of the Earthly marvels he’d seen from space: nothing but low, flat land sloping ever so gradually downward toward the gray, shallow sea.
    Another reassuring sound was that of the landing gear coming down. Drucker landed the upper stage on a long concrete runway. After two weeks of weightlessness, he felt as if he had someone—or maybe two or three someones—sitting on his chest. Moving like an old, old man, he climbed out of the hatch set into the side of the spacecraft and down a little ladder to the runway.
    Having fire trucks standing by was normal. Having groundcrew men jogging up to take charge of the upper stage was also normal. So was having the base commandant, a major general with the silver-gray Waffenfarb of the Rocket Force coming up to greet him. Having a couple of SS men in long black coats accompanying the general, though, was anything but normal.
    Drucker’s eyes narrowed. His dislike for the SS went back almost half a lifetime, to a day when he and other enlisted men of his panzer crew had cheated them of their chosen prey. No one he knew liked the SS. Everyone he knew feared the SS. He feared the SS himself, and feared the men in black the more because his past, if it ever came out, left him vulnerable to them even after all these years.
    As they came up to him, their right arms shot out and up in perfect unison. “ Heil Himmler!” they chorused.
    “Heil!” Drucker returned the salute. He turned to Major General Dornberger, a decent enough fellow. “What’s up, sir?”
    Before Dornberger could speak, one of the SS men said, “You are Drucker, Johannes, lieutenant colonel, pay number—” He rattled it off.
    “I am.” Drucker would much sooner not have been standing there. His feet hurt, his back hurt, even his hair seemed to hurt. He wanted to go somewhere, sit down—or, better yet, lie down—and make his report. After riding a rocket into space, wasn’t he entitled to a little comfort? A bottle of schnapps would have been nice, too. “Who are you?” he asked, as cuttingly as he dared.
    The SS man ignored him. “You are to consider